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One aspect of this that fascinated me is Nazi Germany's "physics denialism" (?) — the reactionary response to the modern physics revolutions of the early 20th c

One aspect of this that fascinated me is Nazi Germany's "physics denialism" (?) — the reactionary response to the modern physics revolutions of the early 20th century. (I.e. the twin revolutions of quantum physics and of relativity). It was a much weirder response than simply an attack on physicists who happened to be Jewish humans. Fields of physics were conspiratorially labelled as having a "Jewish" character, and dismissed as psuedoscience, as pathological science: "Jüdische Physik". There was a fanaticism that's hard to grapple with philosophically, a thing that's far outside rationality, a magical thinking. How much more "magical" can you get than disregarding natural physical laws, and substituting your own? That's the definition of magic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik ("Deutsche Physik" or "Aryan Physics")

foobarian 3y ago
The depictions of "wrong physics" in the 3 Body Problem show kinda remind me of that. Any kind of thinking that had even a whiff of going against the party line would cause problems for the author. What a weird time. I wonder if it's similar to how we look down on e.g. string theory, except I don't know if that's an apples to apples comparison given that we haven't seen any string theory apples yet :-)
- xyzelement 3y ago
  FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Funny I was thinking of how so many otherwise intelligent and educated people believe climate change is just a liberal hoax.
    - blululu 3y ago
      Ask any of your friends how much sea level will rise by 2050 and you will get some pretty wild answers. It's a technical subject that does not immediately affect most of us on a day to day basis. It is not surprising that people would have poorly informed opinions on a topic they don’t really care about very much. For what it’s worth, the average college educated liberal has a comparably abysmal understanding of climate change but their ideological judgement happens to be closer to reality on this one.
      - eastbound 3y ago
        I’m an ex-climate militant, so the fun part is that I have a very large corpus of knowledge on this topic. It’s an incredible experience to have read papers deeper than people who try to defend climate, and to know the weakness of each paper. Militants and even professionals really generally don’t know what they’re talking about, which is across the board in climate change. They are right, but often by mistake or pure luck, and I abhor that. The sad part is any scientific topic that becomes politicized, becomes abyssal in terms of science. It is true of climate change, feminism before that, all the way back to 1500 and planets.
    - PeterStuer 3y ago
      I guess it got swept up in the reasonable skepticism that resulted from the exposed overt politisation of science that was already on the rise but went hokystick in 2020? OTOH climate science as a field did already suffer from siege mentality before, whether justified or not, that did suppress rather than engage disallinged views. (Fwiw my own not too informed view on the subject is we are heading for real disaster, we will and have postponed any real action until too late, but it will be the geo-engeneering grifters that will put the final nail in the coffin)
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    Also a "climate alarmist". There is a band of climate science you can freely publish without reputational damage, but don't go over or under it. But that's probably nothing compared to the narrow band of tolerable science when it comes to questions of race or ethnicity. Anything that could be construed as people of some descent being "inferior" in any aspect is pretty risky to publish.
    - dmbche 3y ago
      You got some of those edgy papers near? I keep hearing things like this, but at every turn the science being published is hot trash.
      - EnigmaFlare 3y ago
        You're probably not searching with a genuine effort to find the good ones. There's the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. The authors found a politically incorrect result and tried to cover it up by inventing a new hypothesis (which they hadn't tested) after they'd collected their data. I also read a fairly comprehensive secondary research paper trying to support the no-biological-differences theory and when it came to Ashkenazi Jews, they admitted the only plausible explanation was genetic superiority. This is an area where the science all points in one direction but popular opinion is in the other direction. People don't look at the research. Probably because they don't want to understand, they just want to spread their political ideology. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever shown that no races are inferior.
        dmbche 3y ago
        What's the conclusion everyone is missing? I'm sure you know how unscientific IQ tests are, I'm surprised that's what you're bringing up here as being "good science" being shut down politically. Just trying to correlatw the two tests they used is absolutely subjective, I would take a step back and reexamine the parts of those studies that convinced you of whatever beliefs you have - it seems like a shoddy foundation.
        3y ago
  - devjab 3y ago
    There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the herd immunity created through general vaccination isn’t just a theory anymore. I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever makes them money. But then you have something like antivaxing which quite literally benefits nobody, because even the people who don’t want to put themselves at risk by getting vaccinated still sort of do so by collectively bringing back terrible diseases through their destruction of the herd immunity… but who could possibly gain anything from spreading this nonsense? “Yay, polio and the measles are back!!!”. Then you have the more harmless stuff like flat-earthers which also don’t really have any obvious driving force. But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny. Anyway, I don’t think you really have a point with what you’re saying here. You can’t put anti-vaccinate “science” up for a discussion with real science because it’s utter nonsense. Similarly you can’t be a climate change denier, you’re free to argue about what causes the heat up, but you can’t deny that it’s been happening at a rapid pace since the Industrial Revolution, at least not with any pretence of doing science.
    - seabass-labrax 3y ago
      > I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. I think the cause might have been the polar opposite of a conspiracy: isolated, but similar, examples of opportunistic fraud. Soon after COVID-19 vaccines were developed, I saw lots of advertisements for pseudo-scientific remedies for COVID-19 - these were clearly intended to make some profit out of the public's justified concerns about mRNA technology. However, once mRNA vaccines proved themselves to be not especially different in efficacy or danger from traditional vaccines, it makes sense that the vendors of pseudo-scientific remedies would seek to maintain the anxiety about vaccines somehow. Hundreds of self-serving quacks trying to keep their customers (and compensate for the shrinking size of their market!) would naturally result in self-sustaining movements of anti-vaxers. The persistent conflation of COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with civil liberties campaigners in some parts of the media would have benefited the quacks further, by making anti-vaxing seem more of a legitimate social movement than it actually was.
  - cedilla 3y ago
    Verbally smacked down? Yes. But it's absurd to even compare this to the purges in China, Germany and Russia, were people were literally killed to death. Also, while everyone has the right to argue anything, no one has the right to have the merits of their effort evaluated. When you go on and tell everyone here that ROT13 is as secure as RSA-2048, everyone will rightly laugh at you without considering your reasoning.
    - Civitello 3y ago
      heck there are probably humans who can sight read ROT13
    - bergen 3y ago
      Not arguing with your point but “killed to death” sounds like an awesome metal band name
      - bitwize 3y ago
        "Kohga, the stupendous chief of the Yiga Clan, is gonna kill you all... to death!"
      - Semaphor 3y ago
        "Killed to Death" is an album by Murdered [0] And there are 7 bands that had a song like that [1] [0]: https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Murdered/Killed_to_Death/726489 https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Murdered/Killed_to_Dea... [1]: https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=Killed+to+Death&type=song_title https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=Killed+to...
      - xhkkffbf 3y ago
        And then there was that classic movie, "Murder By Death."
  - kergonath 3y ago
    > a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated. Interestingly, I have more examples of the opposite: scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming) or totalitarian control freaks (or some enlightened nonsense about being mindless followers of prominent Jewish people, very subtle that one) for saying that vaccines save lives. Also, this has absolutely nothing to do with people getting actually killed or deported for their work, even though some loud mouths have a persecution complex.
    - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
      >scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming) the attacks come from different directions - climate alarmists attack comes from without the scientific community (political, corporate) climate denialist or antivaxer attacks generally come from within the scientific community, generally from experts in the field from which results are being denied. The people who then want to support climate denialism can then say the scientists are non-scientific because they are taking sides, providing another useful tool of attack.
  - Anotheroneagain 3y ago
    FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. We find them where they intersect with actual reality, because it's all just nonsense. Electrons and photons are not real. You won't ever get your quantum computer (at least not in that way), because the physics isn't real.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- boxed 3y ago
  Struggle sessions were full of this stuff yea. Many people were killed during the Cultural Revolution for accepting reality.
- cseleborg 3y ago
  String theory has, however, been successfully applied to oranges. Here in Germany, these are now routinely sold in nets, made of some sort of string. QED
  - perihelions 3y ago
    That makes sense. After all, orange is a color: wrapping oranges with strings is a way of deriving the phenomenon of color confinement.
Vecr 3y ago
I don't know, what's rationality's current reputation?
enasterosophes 3y ago
The Nazis weren't unique in dismissing categories of research on ideological grounds. The USSR label of "bourgeois pseudoscience" [1] was applied to various fields like evolutionary biology. We aren't immune to it now. In the software world, remember that Ballmer called Linux a cancer, and in general there is a meme amongst capitalist software developers that the GPL is a cancerous or infectious license. In academia, there is always a question of where the funding is coming from, or how some research output can be monetized, and so there is an inherent bias against research which doesn't offer hope of capitalist and military-industrial dividends. [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bourgeois_pseudoscience https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bourgeois_pseudoscience
- huytersd 3y ago
  There’s a difference in having a subjective opinion on an OS and flat out denying physical phenomenon like the photoelectric effect. What kind of nonsensical analogy is this.
  - enasterosophes 3y ago
    When did the soviets deny physical phenomena like the photoelectric effect? I believe they had issues with the kind of non-falsifiable metaphysical arguments put forward to try to explain or understand quantum mechanics. The analogy is that regardless of sociopolitical setting, people in power use their non-evidence-based opinions to suppress developments which they consider to be against their ideology. Do you claim Ballmer had no ideology?
    - rtuulik 3y ago
      > When did the soviets deny physical phenomena like the photoelectric effect? I believe they had issues with the kind of non-falsifiable metaphysical arguments put forward to try to explain or understand quantum mechanics. There were many, but the most famous example is probably Lysenkoism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
- guappa 3y ago
kromem 3y ago
You mean things like thinking that the vaccine harms of something nearly the entire world has received which was being said would kill people in two years time is more dangerous than the thing that actually killed millions of people during the last few years? It would be pretty weird if there were major political parties denying the science like that, or even picking who they would vote for as a leader based on the person agreeing with their magical thinking flying in the face of empirical evidence on that subject.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  In the end it seems both "sides" were wrong on this. The vaccines didn't protect people from getting covid, but they also didn't kill them.
  - CogitoCogito 3y ago
    > The vaccines didn't protect people from getting covid What do you mean by this? The vaccines absolutely decreased the likelihood of getting and the severity of Covid.
    - ctrw 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - Daishiman 3y ago
        Whatever information you're getting, know that you're on the end of disinformation, because the mortality reductions were definitely broad-spectrum.
        ctrw 3y ago
        Is that why the US is the only country to mandate covid vaccines for children when there were no deaths in that group?
Anotheroneagain 3y ago
[flagged]
ctrw 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 2143 3y ago
  What's happening to biology today?
- KingJulian 3y ago
  I'm out of the loop on this. Could you point me in a certain direction where I could read about this?
- sojournerc 3y ago
  For both siblings, I'll risk guessing it's about a denial of sex being binary, and the taboo (amongst "liberals") of saying so.
Tainnor 3y ago
It was the same thing in mathematics. For example, when Edmund Landau defined pi as "twice the value of the unique zero of cos in the interval [0, 2]" (a very common definition) instead of geometrically, this was attacked as being "un-German" (even though you can obviously go from the geometric to the analytic definition and vice versa). https://institucional.us.es/blogimus/en/2017/03/pi-and-the-nazis/ https://institucional.us.es/blogimus/en/2017/03/pi-and-the-n...
- soperj 3y ago
  Haven't multiple states done the same thing? (trying to redefine pi)
  - vundercind 3y ago
    Multiple? No. Indiana, in 1897, tried, but the bill failed (after notable early success!). https://www.straightdope.com/21341975/did-a-state-legislature-once-pass-a-law-saying-pi-equals-3 https://www.straightdope.com/21341975/did-a-state-legislatur... (Other sources seem to agree)
  - Tainnor 3y ago
    Not the same thing. Twice the unique zero of cos in [0, 2] is provably equal to the circumference of a circle of diameter 1. It's not equal to 3.2 or whatever the Indiana Pi Bill was trying to legislate.
  - snowpid 3y ago
    [flagged]
- perihelions 3y ago
  Here's a remarkable quote: "The Cauchy-Goursat theorem arouses intolerable displeasure in us Germans". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Bieberbach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Bieberbach https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/hitlers-math https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/hit... ("How German Mathematicians Dealt With the Rise of Nazism" (1967 / 2016))
mgoetzke 3y ago
Similar to some tendencies today with Right Wing from German AfD or American MAGA to dismiss complete fields of science. Whether it is climate change or vaccinations. They do not have a discussion, they dismiss it outright.
- huytersd 3y ago
  You’re not wrong. This comment doesn’t deserve the downvotes.
wolverine876 3y ago
> There was a fanaticism that's hard to grapple with philosophically, a thing that's far outside rationality, a magical thinking. How much more "magical" can you get than disregarding natural physical laws, and substituting your own? That's the definition of magic. People now deny climate change, often because it's 'liberal' - think of the incredible consequences of climate change, far greater than the disregarded physics, and yet it's ignored. It's the same with vaccines - people are causing their kids to become sick and sometimes die. It applies to many more things these days - anything 'liberal' is automatically rejected, regardless of cost.
- archagon 3y ago
  Or “woke.”
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    What in a 'woke' ideology has denied basic, consequential science?
    - archagon 3y ago
      What I mean is that I regularly see science being denied on the right because it’s labeled “woke.” Mostly social science at the moment, but I see the term attached to medical science as well, vis a vis the pandemic for example. It’s utterly nonsensical, but the point is to imbue the subject with negative feelings by association. So, yeah, history repeats itself yet again.
    - nec4b 3y ago
      Woke people believe math is racist. They get people banned or fired from universities. I mean there have been N-treads about the latest woke idiocy on campuses across the states here on HN, why are some people always pretending it doesn't exist?
      - wolverine876 3y ago
        > Woke people believe math is racist. Could you give us an example? I know about racism issues associated with math education, but I've never heard that 'mathematics is racist'. > They get people banned or fired from universities. What does that have to do with denying or rejecting science? Also, sometimes people get fired for legitimate reasons; the fact that they were fired is not a sign of problems. > I mean there have been N-treads about the latest woke idiocy on campuses across the states here on HN, why are some people always pretending it doesn't exist? I'm sure you know that there are powerful tides of misinformation and disinformation on the Internet - about climate change and vaccines, for example. Lots of repetition doesn't make something true. In fact, science is founded on the opposite: One person's verifiable facts are believed before the entire world's repetition.
atoav 3y ago
The Nazis have had a strong mystic and esotheric undercurrent which also had to do with the Thule Society. When Hitler came to power German of all walks of life thought they could wield him to reach their own goals. Being correct in the sense of logic isn't what the Nazis were about. Or as my grandfather said paraphrased from Austrian German (who was in the Hitler Youth, like all kids his age — he was 12 when the war ended): "I didn't like the Nazis because in their ranks only simpletons and brutes would get into positions of leadership." So I am not surprised all kind of things have been called "jewish", as this was an easy way to quickly get rid of people you either disliked, envied or who simply did better work than you. In a sense Trumpism echos that sentiment, where merit or truth doesn't count, but yelling the right thing loud enough does.
mmaniac 3y ago
Quantum physics and relativity were a radical departure from classical mechanics and remain very counter-intuitive for laypeople so it's not hard to see how contemporary persons with ulterior motives and little interest in scientific inquiry would fixate on those.

foobarian 3y ago

The depictions of "wrong physics" in the 3 Body Problem show kinda remind me of that. Any kind of thinking that had even a whiff of going against the party line would cause problems for the author. What a weird time. I wonder if it's similar to how we look down on e.g. string theory, except I don't know if that's an apples to apples comparison given that we haven't seen any string theory apples yet :-)

xyzelement 3y ago
FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Funny I was thinking of how so many otherwise intelligent and educated people believe climate change is just a liberal hoax.
  - blululu 3y ago
    Ask any of your friends how much sea level will rise by 2050 and you will get some pretty wild answers. It's a technical subject that does not immediately affect most of us on a day to day basis. It is not surprising that people would have poorly informed opinions on a topic they don’t really care about very much. For what it’s worth, the average college educated liberal has a comparably abysmal understanding of climate change but their ideological judgement happens to be closer to reality on this one.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      I’m an ex-climate militant, so the fun part is that I have a very large corpus of knowledge on this topic. It’s an incredible experience to have read papers deeper than people who try to defend climate, and to know the weakness of each paper. Militants and even professionals really generally don’t know what they’re talking about, which is across the board in climate change. They are right, but often by mistake or pure luck, and I abhor that. The sad part is any scientific topic that becomes politicized, becomes abyssal in terms of science. It is true of climate change, feminism before that, all the way back to 1500 and planets.
  - PeterStuer 3y ago
    I guess it got swept up in the reasonable skepticism that resulted from the exposed overt politisation of science that was already on the rise but went hokystick in 2020? OTOH climate science as a field did already suffer from siege mentality before, whether justified or not, that did suppress rather than engage disallinged views. (Fwiw my own not too informed view on the subject is we are heading for real disaster, we will and have postponed any real action until too late, but it will be the geo-engeneering grifters that will put the final nail in the coffin)
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Also a "climate alarmist". There is a band of climate science you can freely publish without reputational damage, but don't go over or under it. But that's probably nothing compared to the narrow band of tolerable science when it comes to questions of race or ethnicity. Anything that could be construed as people of some descent being "inferior" in any aspect is pretty risky to publish.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    You got some of those edgy papers near? I keep hearing things like this, but at every turn the science being published is hot trash.
    - EnigmaFlare 3y ago
      You're probably not searching with a genuine effort to find the good ones. There's the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. The authors found a politically incorrect result and tried to cover it up by inventing a new hypothesis (which they hadn't tested) after they'd collected their data. I also read a fairly comprehensive secondary research paper trying to support the no-biological-differences theory and when it came to Ashkenazi Jews, they admitted the only plausible explanation was genetic superiority. This is an area where the science all points in one direction but popular opinion is in the other direction. People don't look at the research. Probably because they don't want to understand, they just want to spread their political ideology. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever shown that no races are inferior.
      - dmbche 3y ago
        What's the conclusion everyone is missing? I'm sure you know how unscientific IQ tests are, I'm surprised that's what you're bringing up here as being "good science" being shut down politically. Just trying to correlatw the two tests they used is absolutely subjective, I would take a step back and reexamine the parts of those studies that convinced you of whatever beliefs you have - it seems like a shoddy foundation.
        3y ago
- devjab 3y ago
  There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the herd immunity created through general vaccination isn’t just a theory anymore. I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever makes them money. But then you have something like antivaxing which quite literally benefits nobody, because even the people who don’t want to put themselves at risk by getting vaccinated still sort of do so by collectively bringing back terrible diseases through their destruction of the herd immunity… but who could possibly gain anything from spreading this nonsense? “Yay, polio and the measles are back!!!”. Then you have the more harmless stuff like flat-earthers which also don’t really have any obvious driving force. But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny. Anyway, I don’t think you really have a point with what you’re saying here. You can’t put anti-vaccinate “science” up for a discussion with real science because it’s utter nonsense. Similarly you can’t be a climate change denier, you’re free to argue about what causes the heat up, but you can’t deny that it’s been happening at a rapid pace since the Industrial Revolution, at least not with any pretence of doing science.
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    > I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. I think the cause might have been the polar opposite of a conspiracy: isolated, but similar, examples of opportunistic fraud. Soon after COVID-19 vaccines were developed, I saw lots of advertisements for pseudo-scientific remedies for COVID-19 - these were clearly intended to make some profit out of the public's justified concerns about mRNA technology. However, once mRNA vaccines proved themselves to be not especially different in efficacy or danger from traditional vaccines, it makes sense that the vendors of pseudo-scientific remedies would seek to maintain the anxiety about vaccines somehow. Hundreds of self-serving quacks trying to keep their customers (and compensate for the shrinking size of their market!) would naturally result in self-sustaining movements of anti-vaxers. The persistent conflation of COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with civil liberties campaigners in some parts of the media would have benefited the quacks further, by making anti-vaxing seem more of a legitimate social movement than it actually was.
- cedilla 3y ago
  Verbally smacked down? Yes. But it's absurd to even compare this to the purges in China, Germany and Russia, were people were literally killed to death. Also, while everyone has the right to argue anything, no one has the right to have the merits of their effort evaluated. When you go on and tell everyone here that ROT13 is as secure as RSA-2048, everyone will rightly laugh at you without considering your reasoning.
  - Civitello 3y ago
    heck there are probably humans who can sight read ROT13
  - bergen 3y ago
    Not arguing with your point but “killed to death” sounds like an awesome metal band name
    - bitwize 3y ago
      "Kohga, the stupendous chief of the Yiga Clan, is gonna kill you all... to death!"
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      "Killed to Death" is an album by Murdered [0] And there are 7 bands that had a song like that [1] [0]: https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Murdered/Killed_to_Death/726489 https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Murdered/Killed_to_Dea... [1]: https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=Killed+to+Death&type=song_title https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=Killed+to...
    - xhkkffbf 3y ago
      And then there was that classic movie, "Murder By Death."
- kergonath 3y ago
  > a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated. Interestingly, I have more examples of the opposite: scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming) or totalitarian control freaks (or some enlightened nonsense about being mindless followers of prominent Jewish people, very subtle that one) for saying that vaccines save lives. Also, this has absolutely nothing to do with people getting actually killed or deported for their work, even though some loud mouths have a persecution complex.
  - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    >scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming) the attacks come from different directions - climate alarmists attack comes from without the scientific community (political, corporate) climate denialist or antivaxer attacks generally come from within the scientific community, generally from experts in the field from which results are being denied. The people who then want to support climate denialism can then say the scientists are non-scientific because they are taking sides, providing another useful tool of attack.
- Anotheroneagain 3y ago
  FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. We find them where they intersect with actual reality, because it's all just nonsense. Electrons and photons are not real. You won't ever get your quantum computer (at least not in that way), because the physics isn't real.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
boxed 3y ago
Struggle sessions were full of this stuff yea. Many people were killed during the Cultural Revolution for accepting reality.
cseleborg 3y ago
String theory has, however, been successfully applied to oranges. Here in Germany, these are now routinely sold in nets, made of some sort of string. QED
- perihelions 3y ago
  That makes sense. After all, orange is a color: wrapping oranges with strings is a way of deriving the phenomenon of color confinement.

Vecr 3y ago

I don't know, what's rationality's current reputation?

enasterosophes 3y ago

The Nazis weren't unique in dismissing categories of research on ideological grounds. The USSR label of "bourgeois pseudoscience" [1] was applied to various fields like evolutionary biology. We aren't immune to it now. In the software world, remember that Ballmer called Linux a cancer, and in general there is a meme amongst capitalist software developers that the GPL is a cancerous or infectious license. In academia, there is always a question of where the funding is coming from, or how some research output can be monetized, and so there is an inherent bias against research which doesn't offer hope of capitalist and military-industrial dividends. [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bourgeois_pseudoscience https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bourgeois_pseudoscience

huytersd 3y ago
There’s a difference in having a subjective opinion on an OS and flat out denying physical phenomenon like the photoelectric effect. What kind of nonsensical analogy is this.
- enasterosophes 3y ago
  When did the soviets deny physical phenomena like the photoelectric effect? I believe they had issues with the kind of non-falsifiable metaphysical arguments put forward to try to explain or understand quantum mechanics. The analogy is that regardless of sociopolitical setting, people in power use their non-evidence-based opinions to suppress developments which they consider to be against their ideology. Do you claim Ballmer had no ideology?
  - rtuulik 3y ago
    > When did the soviets deny physical phenomena like the photoelectric effect? I believe they had issues with the kind of non-falsifiable metaphysical arguments put forward to try to explain or understand quantum mechanics. There were many, but the most famous example is probably Lysenkoism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
guappa 3y ago

kromem 3y ago

You mean things like thinking that the vaccine harms of something nearly the entire world has received which was being said would kill people in two years time is more dangerous than the thing that actually killed millions of people during the last few years? It would be pretty weird if there were major political parties denying the science like that, or even picking who they would vote for as a leader based on the person agreeing with their magical thinking flying in the face of empirical evidence on that subject.

carlosjobim 3y ago
In the end it seems both "sides" were wrong on this. The vaccines didn't protect people from getting covid, but they also didn't kill them.
- CogitoCogito 3y ago
  > The vaccines didn't protect people from getting covid What do you mean by this? The vaccines absolutely decreased the likelihood of getting and the severity of Covid.
  - ctrw 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Daishiman 3y ago
      Whatever information you're getting, know that you're on the end of disinformation, because the mortality reductions were definitely broad-spectrum.
      - ctrw 3y ago
        Is that why the US is the only country to mandate covid vaccines for children when there were no deaths in that group?

Anotheroneagain 3y ago

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ctrw 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago
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2143 3y ago
What's happening to biology today?
KingJulian 3y ago
I'm out of the loop on this. Could you point me in a certain direction where I could read about this?
sojournerc 3y ago
For both siblings, I'll risk guessing it's about a denial of sex being binary, and the taboo (amongst "liberals") of saying so.

Tainnor 3y ago

It was the same thing in mathematics. For example, when Edmund Landau defined pi as "twice the value of the unique zero of cos in the interval [0, 2]" (a very common definition) instead of geometrically, this was attacked as being "un-German" (even though you can obviously go from the geometric to the analytic definition and vice versa). https://institucional.us.es/blogimus/en/2017/03/pi-and-the-nazis/ https://institucional.us.es/blogimus/en/2017/03/pi-and-the-n...

soperj 3y ago
Haven't multiple states done the same thing? (trying to redefine pi)
- vundercind 3y ago
  Multiple? No. Indiana, in 1897, tried, but the bill failed (after notable early success!). https://www.straightdope.com/21341975/did-a-state-legislature-once-pass-a-law-saying-pi-equals-3 https://www.straightdope.com/21341975/did-a-state-legislatur... (Other sources seem to agree)
- Tainnor 3y ago
  Not the same thing. Twice the unique zero of cos in [0, 2] is provably equal to the circumference of a circle of diameter 1. It's not equal to 3.2 or whatever the Indiana Pi Bill was trying to legislate.
- snowpid 3y ago
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perihelions 3y ago
Here's a remarkable quote: "The Cauchy-Goursat theorem arouses intolerable displeasure in us Germans". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Bieberbach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Bieberbach https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/hitlers-math https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/hit... ("How German Mathematicians Dealt With the Rise of Nazism" (1967 / 2016))

mgoetzke 3y ago

Similar to some tendencies today with Right Wing from German AfD or American MAGA to dismiss complete fields of science. Whether it is climate change or vaccinations. They do not have a discussion, they dismiss it outright.

huytersd 3y ago
You’re not wrong. This comment doesn’t deserve the downvotes.

wolverine876 3y ago

> There was a fanaticism that's hard to grapple with philosophically, a thing that's far outside rationality, a magical thinking. How much more "magical" can you get than disregarding natural physical laws, and substituting your own? That's the definition of magic. People now deny climate change, often because it's 'liberal' - think of the incredible consequences of climate change, far greater than the disregarded physics, and yet it's ignored. It's the same with vaccines - people are causing their kids to become sick and sometimes die. It applies to many more things these days - anything 'liberal' is automatically rejected, regardless of cost.

archagon 3y ago
Or “woke.”
- wolverine876 3y ago
  What in a 'woke' ideology has denied basic, consequential science?
  - archagon 3y ago
    What I mean is that I regularly see science being denied on the right because it’s labeled “woke.” Mostly social science at the moment, but I see the term attached to medical science as well, vis a vis the pandemic for example. It’s utterly nonsensical, but the point is to imbue the subject with negative feelings by association. So, yeah, history repeats itself yet again.
  - nec4b 3y ago
    Woke people believe math is racist. They get people banned or fired from universities. I mean there have been N-treads about the latest woke idiocy on campuses across the states here on HN, why are some people always pretending it doesn't exist?
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      > Woke people believe math is racist. Could you give us an example? I know about racism issues associated with math education, but I've never heard that 'mathematics is racist'. > They get people banned or fired from universities. What does that have to do with denying or rejecting science? Also, sometimes people get fired for legitimate reasons; the fact that they were fired is not a sign of problems. > I mean there have been N-treads about the latest woke idiocy on campuses across the states here on HN, why are some people always pretending it doesn't exist? I'm sure you know that there are powerful tides of misinformation and disinformation on the Internet - about climate change and vaccines, for example. Lots of repetition doesn't make something true. In fact, science is founded on the opposite: One person's verifiable facts are believed before the entire world's repetition.

atoav 3y ago

The Nazis have had a strong mystic and esotheric undercurrent which also had to do with the Thule Society. When Hitler came to power German of all walks of life thought they could wield him to reach their own goals. Being correct in the sense of logic isn't what the Nazis were about. Or as my grandfather said paraphrased from Austrian German (who was in the Hitler Youth, like all kids his age — he was 12 when the war ended): "I didn't like the Nazis because in their ranks only simpletons and brutes would get into positions of leadership." So I am not surprised all kind of things have been called "jewish", as this was an easy way to quickly get rid of people you either disliked, envied or who simply did better work than you. In a sense Trumpism echos that sentiment, where merit or truth doesn't count, but yelling the right thing loud enough does.

mmaniac 3y ago

Quantum physics and relativity were a radical departure from classical mechanics and remain very counter-intuitive for laypeople so it's not hard to see how contemporary persons with ulterior motives and little interest in scientific inquiry would fixate on those.